I think they chose a terrible means to stop the earth, but the plan itself may still be salvageable (no, I'm not seriously suggesting it would be a good idea).

I think they chose a terrible means to stop the earth, but the plan itself may still be salvageable (no, I'm not seriously suggesting it would be a good idea). Consider angular momentum. It must be conserved. And a cool fact about that is that if you spin around and gain angular momentum, you steal it from the earth until you stop. So all we need is a large number of very large and very fast spinning devices that we can turn on, spin up over say 5 minutes, and then stop afterwards. They'd probably need to spin at speeds that would shatter the atoms they're made of, of course, and the entire continent would need to be covered in them, I imagine. But at least the atmosphere would be saved, and it wouldn't be a sudden stop and start.